Brian Wells' goals in life didn't seem to extend much beyond finding the address for his next pizza delivery. He was a solitary man whose only regular houseguest was his mom, with whom he shared Sunday steak dinners. He was so reluctant about calling attention to himself that he had the hubcaps removed from his car because they were too flashy. He cared for three cats that he simply called Kitty. And every morning for five years, as regular as clock hands, he waved the same unsmiling hello to the clerks in the health-food shop next to Mama Mia's, the pizzeria that employed him.
So, to the small circle of people who knew Wells, it came as a shock when the reticent and retiring 46-year-old appeared at a teller's window in a bank near Erie, Pa., demanded money and lifted his shirt to reveal a bomb locked around his neck. Wells fled but was stopped and pulled from his car seconds later by passing state troopers alerted by 911 callers in the bank. As he sat handcuffed and cross-legged on the ground, Wells warned troopers there was a bomb beneath his T shirt and pleaded for help in getting it off. Officers backed off to summon the bomb squad, and as minutes ticked away, he became increasingly agitated and desperate. "I don't have a lot of time," he said. "It's gonna go off." And then, referring to a mysterious "he," Wells added, "He pulled a key out and started a timer. I heard the thing ticking when he did it." Wells never said who "he" was. Moments after that there came a sharp blast, and Wells slumped over, dead.
Police later recovered a bag of cash, a robbery note and a homemade zip gun from his car, but Wells' puzzling statements left investigators pondering three possible scenarios: Wells was forced into a crime and made its only victim; he was an accomplice, or he acted alone. To many of those who knew him, the last two theories seemed impossible.
Wells worked for much of the last dozen years of his life as a pizza-delivery man in and around Erie, a blue-collar town of 100,000 midway between Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, N.Y. One of seven children, Wells was a high school dropout. He was a withdrawn but likable man, friends say, a guy who wore a T shirt and jeans nearly every day. He often passed the time between deliveries thumbing through newspapers. "I don't believe he had the mentality to build a bomb," says Mark Tupek, who hired Wells to deliver pies at a local pizza shop several years ago. Tupek remembers that Wells seemed to have a strong sense of right and wrong: "I used to tell him to help himself to food in the shop if he got hungry, but he never, ever touched it. He said it wasn't his." Nor was he angling for a better life. "He never talked about any dreams or big plans," says Tupek. "He was just a homebody. I took him to a bar one night after work, and he just froze on his barstool. He didn't like to go out."